Sapphire HD5770 VaporX Crossfire review

Since the release of the HD5800 series in September last year, AMD and its partner manufacturers have been busy releasing new DirectX 11 graphics cards like it’s going out of style.
Since its release in October 2009, the HD5770, aimed at the midrange of the market, has fared well in terms of user reception. To give it that little bit of added boost Sapphire has now released its own slightly overclocked HD5770 based on the award winning VaporX cooling technology.

This version comes equipped with additional cooling facilities, high polymer capacitors and ‘Black Diamond’ chokes which employ a built in head spreader which serves to drop operating temperatures and boost efficiency by 10% and 25% respectively. As a result Sapphire has tweaked the clock speed on the unit from 850MHz to 860MHz, leaving significant headroom for enthusiasts.

Based on the ‘Juniper’ design the HD5770 features a 40nm core which includes 1.04 billion transistors. It also features 800 stream processors, 1GB of GDDR5 memory running at 1200MHz on a 128 bit bus, 40 texture units and 16 ROPs.

To put it into context, a single HD5770 offers about 50% the performance of the HD5870 – AMD’s flagship DirectX 11 GPU.

From a connectivity perspective the HD5770 incorporates two dual link DVI ports, a single HDMI port which supports HDMI 1.3 and 7.1 Surround Sound, and a display port connection. These combined allow the user to employ AMD’s Eyefinity technology to concurrently run three displays of up to 30 inches each.

A single HD5770 commands a TDP of roughly 110W at load and roughly 18 at Idle. This time around however we had the opportunity to review two of these GPUs in Crossfire, which saw the pull roughly 254W at load while running benchmarks. Such a set up would typically require a PSU of at 700W or more.

Benchmarks

Test Rig

CPU AMD Phenom II 945 3.0GHz
Motherboard Biostar TA790GX A3+ 5.x
RAM 2X2GB Kingston DDR3 1333MHz

Conclusion

The HD5770 VaporX edition in Crossfire mode offers very similar performance to that of a single HD5870. At roughly R2000 a piece, the setup will cost around the same as the HD 5870, and it is therefore difficult to recommend over the simpler single GPU solution.

Users could buy one HD 5770 now, and it would run most games quite happily at medium resolutions and settings. A few months down the line they could buy another HD 5770, thereby achieving HD 5870 performance in the long run, while staggering the cost.

If a buyer is however willing to sacrifice DirectX 11 support (which may not be wise in the long run), very similar performance can be found in the HD4870 X2, which retails for considerably less.

While the HD5770 may be a great card for mid range gamers looking to jump on the DirectX 11 bandwagon, it is still difficult to recommend them in crossfire over the HD 5870, unless users are looking to dilute the cost over a period of time.

Scores

Overall 70

Performance 65

Value 50

Features 70

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